USB-C has enabled a lot of great things, most notably removing the no less than three attempts to plug in the cable correctly, but gone are the days of just 5V over those lines. [Meticulous Technologies] sent in their project to help easily identify what voltage your USB-C line is running at, the USB VSense.
The USB VSense is an inline board that has USB-C connectors on either end, and supporting up to 240W you don’t have to worry about it throttling your device. One of the coolest design aspects of this board is that it uses stacked PCB construction as the enclosure, the display, and the PCB doing all the sensing and displaying. And for sensing this small device has a good number of cool tricks, it will sense all the eight common USB-C voltages, but it will also measure and alert you to variations of the voltage outside the normal range by blinking the various colored LEDs in specific patterns. For instance should you have it plugged into a line that’s sitting over 48V the VSense white 48V LED will be rapidly blinking, warning you that something in your setup has gone horribly wrong.
Having dedicated uniquely colored LEDs for each common level allows you to at a glance know what the voltage is at without the need to read anything. With a max current draw of less than 6mA you won’t feel bad about using it on a USB battery pack for many applications.
The USB VSense has completed a small production run and has stated their intention to open source their design as soon as possible after their Crowd Supply campaign. We’ve featured other USB-C PD projects and no doubt we’ll be seeing more as this standard continues to gain traction with more and more devices relying on it for their DC power.